NancyO.Gallman

Education

Nancy O. Gallman is a Ph.D. candidate in Early American History. Her dissertation, "Blood & Property: Spanish Law and Native Justice in the Florida–Georgia Borderlands, 1784–1821," is a comparative legal history of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish Florida borderlands. It examines the interactions between Spanish colonial law and the customary law of the Lower Creeks and Seminoles to show how a broadly defined, pluralistic system of law shaped the development of East Florida, where neither the Spanish nor Native peoples could dominate but where both had to adapt to the other. She argues that, on the basis of mutual tolerance and restraint, this mixed legal culture reinforced Native sovereignty, promoted multiple conceptions of justice, race, gender, labor, and property, and, as a result, made East Florida a greater target of U.S. aggression in the early years of the new republic. This study of legal pluralism on the Florida–Georgia border refines our understanding of the role of Native law in the constitution of power during the revolutionary era.

The working title of her manuscript is “American Constitutions: Life, Liberty, and Property in Spanish East Florida.”

Research and teaching interests include: Spanish American borderlands; early American legal pluralism; early Native history and African American history in the Southeast and Gulf South; the comparative histories of empire; North American and Atlantic slaveries; colonial Latin America

"Covering Blood and Graves: Murder and Law on Imperial Margins," with Alan Taylor, in Meanings of Justice in British and Iberian America: Settler and Indigenous Law as Counterpoints, 1600–1825, eds. Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross (NYU Press, forthcoming).

"Reconstituting Power in an American Borderland: Political Change in Colonial East Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly 94, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 169–191.